@Amby....yeah, with Georgia they figured out the secret....export prison inmates. That worked so much better than just persecuting religious minorities and hoping they would flee to the colonies. Also I was referring more to busybody-ism than the nanny state. My grandfather always dated the decline of America to the moment they installed air conditioning in the US Capitol and Congressional office buildings, which he claimed profoundly changed the nature and culture of DC.

Interesting take on things gopher!

Air Conditioners and The Decline of the American Empire.

Probably just air con in government building has lead to the decline :p

Mouse, 3.5 miles? We use decimals too. We often say 1.5 or 2.5 feet. In the digital age, things have all converted to decimals.

Oh, and you can just as easily say 1 meter, 5 centimeters instead of 1.05 meters. The unit of measure is based on the meter and the liter, so it is metric, not decimal.

The unit of measure is based on decimal sets (or fractions) of the base unit, as well.

A centimetre is .01 of a metre. Sure, you can say 1m5cm, but you are quite literally saying 1 and 5/100 metres. The decimal manipulation of the base unit is integral to the system.

And technically, in a digital age, everything is converted to binary ;) Subsequent conversion to decimal notation is purely for end user ease of use :p

My point is, it is called metric, not decimal, because it is based on the meter/liter. You also still use degrees, minutes, and seconds for compass and pounds for weight (grams is a measure of mass, not weight).

A decimal measurement system is any set of measures where the units differ by powers of ten. The metric system is but one example, the Wilberforce Mann system is another. Stevins (La Disma) first suggested the practibily of it. There have been other decimal systems, eg based on the troy grain and inch.

So while the metric system you are using is *a* decimal system, it is called the metric system.

And yet, if asked for a conversion to decimal, everyone except a literal genie knows exactly what you mean.

Neither degrees (in terms of angle) nor pounds (in terms of force) are SI units, by the way. That would be, respectively, radians and newtons.

You guys are arguing over nothing. Yes the proper name is metric .Big deal. Move on.

Some say 6 or half a dozen. Same same but different

I was actually thinking of metric, but somehow wrote decimal. Love it how you lot blow things up out of proportion.

YCHTT - it's not meter and liter it's metre and litre. Australia Day discussion - Queen's English only applies ;-)

Not even just 'cause of the topic - when the US officially adopts said units, they can also raise their spelling from "incorrect" to "regional differences" :p

No, it should be Metre and litre. I agree with that.

Radians isn't anymore a decimal measurement system than degrees considering there are 2*Pi radians in a circle.

I thought our new National Anthem was straight forward, & easy enough..
"Australians let us all ring Joyce, for she is young and free.."

Barnaby is a girl?

I couldn't make any definitive comment on Barnaby's gender & the Nationals are too busy tearing themselves apart over fracking for it to matter.
Re the comments about the Queen, Governor General and the events in November 1975. At least the Queen is still sober after breakfast.

@_YCHTT, you're right about it being metric, but there's a tendency amongst Australians to use decimal to describe metric, because we converted from currency in Australian Pounds, Shillings sixpences, threepences and pennies, based on the old UK currency, to Australian dollars and cents, with 100 cents making a dollar, and did this in the mid 1960's. The huge Government advertising / information campaign called it "Decimal Currency"...so there's this almost subliminal memory of that and the two terms are often interchangeable in Australia, people link the changes in measuring systems with the change in currency. Few people have the innate precision with this stuff that a solid engineering or mathematics degree gives.

I have a friend who is a lawyer and has been involved in large engineering projects, and we have a comedy routine based on lawyers talking to engineers, eg
Lawyer: " All I wanted was a simple answer, but I got a highly technical dissertation that strayed into irrelevancy and jargon. Don't these people understand English ?"
Engineer: " I did my best to dumb it down and simplify a highly complex issue. But the eyes glazed over, he stopped listening half way through, how these people ever got a degree defies all logic. "
Of course we think it's funny, especially after consuming a few doses of neck oil.

I have a friend who specializes in teaching technical writing. She is getting a PhD in a field called "Writing Studies" from the College of Liberal Arts with subsidiary work in the College of Education to work in the College of Science and Engineering instructing Engineers in how to speak English understandably. Her stories are all hysterical....almost as good as her stories of trying to convince people at the University that as an Indian she is enrolled in a graduate program in the Liberal Arts.

But on the subject of Australia and fracking, why don't y'all actually own your land Down Under? I don't know how that changed within the English tradition after the American Revolution. The Stewart-Londonderry-Castlereagh family owned the mineral rights on their coal in the 19th Century, so when did things change? A one eighth or three-sixteenths mineral royalty to the landowners, which is standard depending on the upfront lease payments, would profoundly change the politics and feelings on the ground.

Mineral rights are separate from private land ownership in most countries. As I understand it, it can be a bit more complicated in the United States. But even there private landholders do not always own the mineral rights to their own land.

http://www.miningfacts.org/Blog/Mining-News/The-Case-for-Private-Ownership-of-Mineral-Rights/

As a crude generalisation, State governments "own" the rights to minerals etc under the ground, property owners only"own" the surface layer, although they can excavate to build foundations, cellars etc

So a mining company has to deal with State govts over mineral rights, and other issues, the Federal government often gets involved, generally on taxes, and then there's land owners, or pastoralists with leaseholds, traditional owners, etc etc. When I worked in mining exploration, one of our jokes was, we wanted to find several billion dollars worth of copper, gold and uranium in one large deposit, all smack under the intersecting point of three State governments & sit back and watch a huge squabble between all the stakeholders

That combination of minerals is found together in some types of deposits, usually mainly copper, with some gold and a lesser proportion of uranium. The uranium we wanted to get environmental issues thrown in as well. A managing geologist once said he wanted us to find copper, gold and, please please NO uranium.

I understand all of that. My point was that English Common law used to entail mineral rights in fee simple ownership until it was changed, presumably at some point after the American Revolution. Y'all allowed "the state" to take from you rights that were enjoyed by Yeoman landowners previously. These aren't trivial rights, especially in Australia. It is as though y'all surrendered your rights to jury trials or to publicly confront an accuser in criminal cases. I'm just wondering how y'all let yourselves get skinned like that.

I believe that the main axis in downtown Sydney is Castlereagh Street. The Earls of Castelreagh are to the Marquesses of Londonderry as the Prince of Wales is to the King of England. The Marquesses of Londonderry were extraordinarily rich and had the money to spend their lives in high level British politics (before and after joining the House of Lords) because several of their estates in Yorkshire sat on top of incredibly rich coal deposits. Therefore, Great Britain must have still had American style property rights before 1900.